Develop's newest columnist Will Luton says hello! Oh, and also, mobiles will replace consoles
Sat on a stage in a bright green armchair, shoeless, sipping brandy aside a faux fireplace Mark Rein jokingly spouts wisdom: “People who think consoles will disappear are idiots”.
Earlier that day, also on the GameHorizon Conference stage, Jesse Schell – author of The Art of Games Design: A Book of Lenses – humbly talked on future thinking and why exercising our crystal ball-gazing, even if we’re wrong, makes us better at predicting the future. So that’s what I’ll do.
I believe that if Rein meant that big-budget, blockbuster game demand won’t disappear, then I fully agree with him. If, however, he thinks that in twenty years that we’ll still be plugging plastic boxes in to TVs, I think he’s missing the mark.
History has shown us that in the games business nothing is sacred. Our consumers are a growing demographic with little loyalty to platform, and they will pay for and play with the most immediate and satisfying experience available.
They moved from the arcade to the home system, and have spread from the console, to the PC, to the web and now to mobile. Today it is mobile that is most convenient if not, to all people at least, the most immediately satisfying experience.
I predict that when mobile devices become widely and easily wirelessly connected to the game controller and the TV, it will start to replace the console. I even think that mobile-as-a-console will be common usage within ten years.
Mobile hits to date, perhaps with the exception of Infinity Blade, have a short-form anatomy, where play occurs over tens – if not hundreds or thousands – of sessions lasting from two-to-10 minutes each (a median session time for our game My Star is currently 2.1 minutes).
Small screen devices augment with a player’s routine; they do not disrupt it for preplanned play sessions involving complex game mechanics and character development.
The mobile player wants something immediate at the bus stop and when they return home, they have other medium-sized screen entertainment that vies for heftier chunks of attention; including the console. When mobile can deliver what a console can as well as or better than it can, users will begin to dump the dedicated device in favour of the multitasker. It’s happened
with the home phone, calculator, diary and now, in the case of tablets, the laptop and home PC.
That ‘when’ caveat is a pretty mammoth one: The power increases in mobile have been blistering year-on-year and are now approaching our current console generation. Firemint’s Real Racing 2 running on iPad 2 via HDMI today is pretty much there visually, but still a way off a top-end PC.
Yet cloud gaming is set to make client power irrelevant within the decade. I see now that the biggest shift is a small technological one (standardised wireless TV and controller connections) and a larger developer and consumer cultural one.
Should the hardware jigsaw pieces fall in place quickly (iOS 5 and Apple TV 2 is to have wireless screen mirroring), the cultural shift could still be a chicken or egg stand-off; with no triple-A content on the devices, consumers will not move from consoles and generate a demand. However, without demand being generated, developers will not make content.
In this situation a catalyst will be needed: Traditionally Apple has led the way in changing usage and innovating technology. It would be perfectly perched to kill the console with the iOS device range, with Google undoubtedly following.
However, Apple isn’t, like Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. It isn’t a content generator, so would require external flagships, as it found in the Unreal Engine for the launch of the iPhone 4.
This is all the realms of pure speculation, of course, and am not saying that Epic Games will single-handedly kill the console, but with $11.2 million in revenue to date Infinity Blade is mobile’s first true triple-A title, and could play a bit part in gaming’s future.
And that’s my crystal balls all gazed out. I’m burying all these predictions in a time capsule deep in the Blue Peter garden besides Mabel.
You at home can cut out and keep this article, then when you see me in 2021 and the PS4 has become the first billion selling console and every home has a Xbox 720, call me an idiot.
I've been involved in a pretty interesting twitter conversation about this topic recently. I agree that with the current mobile hardware trajectory, mobiles will surpass consoles in processing power before long - simply because their update cycles are so much faster. But the notion that mobiles will replace consoles contains an inherent assumption that native processing power will be what dictates the platforms that developers choose to work on and subsequently the platforms that consumers choose to play on.
There has to be a bottleneck somewhere for the whole development cycle to function sensibly I think. There's no point in a doubling or tripling of hardware performance every 18 months if the developers have to re-learn new tools to take advantage of that power within that timeframe – development cycles are just too long, especially for high fidelity, top-spec games. Despite hardware capability, the tools and the expertise to use those tools will become the new bottleneck for performance.
Back onto mobiles, I think they will be just another device that people consume high-end gaming content on alongside consoles, smart TVs, tablets or whatever. For some users they may replace the need to own several devices, but I think ultimately, there is a consumer appetite for owning a range of devices – irrespective of large amounts of functionality crossover (just look at how many iPhone owners have iPads).
We're not heading towards a future where there is a consolidation of platforms at the hardware level - it will be a consolidation of platforms at the service level. OnLive and Gakai will spawn competitors and every service will be available on every device. Mobiles are a much bigger part of gaming’s future than anyone imagined even just 3 years ago, but I think the future is the Cloud on every device. It’s the same as putting every box inside one shell (which indeed may be the mobile) but I’d be surprised if consumers didn’t opt into continuing to own several devices and demand a higher level of service crossover between them.
Thanks for your comments Fraser. I want to make clear (if it wasn't from the piece) that I don't think that processing power has a big part to play, it's not my "inherent assumption" at all, so agree with you on that point.
I also agree that the dominant platforms will be exclusively cloud-based, but they will have to be delivered via hardware and I'm going out on a limb to say that the hardware best placed to deliver that isn't the console, but a ubiquitous portable device i.e the mobile phone. For the majority at least.
I also think the smart TV will have a huge part to play, TV-as-a-console could replace mobile-as-a-console down the line, but people generally refresh TVs less often than mobiles, so it will be a slower uptake.
However, the idea that in to the future, when cloud gaming is the norm, that people go in to a shop and buy a piece of hardware that they plug in to a TV is something I simply can't see.
The console will die like the Freeview box, it's a relic of when functionality wasn't integrated in to the device.
As for what people imagined three years ago, perhaps even five or ten years ago, there were many saying mobile would kill the handheld. Just nobody took them seriously.
I must confess, for shame, that I merely skimmed your piece before commenting so apologies if my comments seemed combative. *slinks off sheepishly...
I think we are pretty much fully in agreement about all of this.
What will be really interesting to see is how the consumer transition to service competition from box competition pans out. I wonder which services will form alliances and if exclusivity will fade away, or become something like TV channels having exclusivity for certain content (sporting events etc.).
Then again, you wouldn't buy a TV with just one channel so if my future mobile can run the whole cloud gaming gang - Gakai, Onlive, some future iteration of Steam with streaming games and whatever else comes about between now and then - it will just come down to how many of these 'channels' I decide to subscribe to.
I think the phone could be the one box for delivery for all of this, though that could make it tough for younger consumers, what with expensive contracts and all. Maybe it will be smart TVs that become the dominant streaming device for cloud games, with phones becoming a popular second option favoured by some consumers, by offering access to exactly the same content.
It’d be great to see the next Xbox or PS3 coming in different versions – one integrated into the TV, one with no optical disc drive. If those devices don’t opt into cloud gaming in some way, there could be trouble a brewing…
Will -- this is a great article. Would you consider shooting a brief video with your predictions? Just with a webcam or celphone, or whatever. If you do, I'd be glad to feature it on www.crystalballsociety.com!
